From the Back Forty began as a weekly column in the Ironwood (Michigan) Daily Globe in the early 90s. Back then, it described a neo-ruralite’s attempts at building and running a backwoods homestead in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. It has since appeared in a variety of rural daily newspapers in Livingston (Montana) Enterprise, the Greenville (Ohio) Daily Advocate, and the Athens (Ohio) Messenger. The author, Gary Lamberg, is now a neo-blogger, with a day job at the Cheboygan Daily Tribune. If space permits a version of this blog may also appear in that newspaper.

How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

I can’t begin to answer that question, but I can tell you that our friendly neighborhood groundhog nearly “chucked” our garden this year.

On return from a couple of days camping in the U.P. we discovered a sizeable portion of the garden had been hit hard. The leftover stalks of broccoli looked like something from a science fiction movie. The snow peas that had been left in full bloom were reduced to little one-leaf wonders. A row of bush beans disappeared. And there was no trace of a beautiful row of spinach I planned to harvest as soon as we got home from camping.

I found tracks in the garden, but they didn’t look like raccoons –regular masked garden raiders, I’m all too familiar with.

The garden had been wrecked in past years by deer, but the six-wire electric fence constructed to keep out Bambi had not been disturbed, making deer predation unlikely.

The plot thickened.

The following evening, I spotted a large rodent munching happily among the wasted pea plants. A woodchuck, caught in the act.

After many years of gardening in very rural areas, I had yet to be “chucked”. Based on the quick work he made of the garden, I can see why they call these critters groundhogs because he certainly pigged out on my garden.

I tried live trapping the sucker over the next few days, enticing the chubby marauder with an assortment of delectable vegetables. No luck. He even turned his nose up to freshly-sliced kiwi. Turns out woodchucks are notoriously hard to live trap.

The next step was to borrow a small caliber rifle. Yeah, I know that sounds extreme, but this over-sized rat wasn’t going to let us harvest anything if I didn’t do something drastic.

Over the next several days I caught “woody” in the act a few times, but only managed one clear shot. I’m pretty sure I missed him. However, that was the last I’ve seen of the critter. He was probably scared out of his wits and thought discretion the better part of valor. After the apparent miss, you wouldn’t believe something that looked so fat could move so fast.